A view of autism from along the spectrum

School’s out and the rush of annual PPT meetings that many schools cram into May and June is over. As always, there were a few outlandish things said by school district personnel both during the meetings and in other discussions. I’m repeating some of these below. I’ve heard most of these second or third hand, so consider this my disclosure regarding the accuracy of the quotes. Nonetheless, I’m confident that the general messages below are very similar to what administrators delivered.

• A principal to a parent requesting transportation for an autistic student to the school district’s summer enrichment program which offers a variety of social and academic development opportunities:
  

  “Your child is not eligible for transportation because she is not behind grade level in academics.”

  This principal may want to read the IDEA requirements for determining the applicability of summer programming.

• A parent of a child moving to a new and larger school asked a principal how they would handle a child that got distracted and didn’t come out of a locker room in time for either gym class or their next class. The principal answered:
  

  “Oh, don’t worry! We’ve had lots of children like that!”

  Nice job blowing off the question.

• An administrator to a parent evaluating a placement in a private school for children with special needs:
  

  “We’ll approve any of the three schools you mention, but we won’t provide transportation to the third one.”

  Perhaps they should have said “We’ll make sure that we can provide an appropriate program at one of the two schools that are closer to your home.”

• An administrator during a PPT meeting when the topic of summer programming came up:
  

  “Let’s have the staff finish their reports and they can go back to their classes and we can talk about it when the staff has gone.”

  After a pushback from a parent who knows that the discussion is always different when only the administrator is present:

  “OK, if you want to talk about it now, we will.”

  Nice recovery and guess what? The staff that was going to be excused, agreed with he parents!

• I saved the most bizarre for last. The parent of a child with a degenerative muscle condition that impacted her speaking requested speech services for the upcoming year. The speech and language specialist said to the parent:
  

  “She’ll grow out of it.”

  The speech and language specialist should probably look up the definition of degenerative.